AR Collaboration

Overview

Augmented reality can be used as a collaborative tool, allowing multiple users to view and collaborate on the same digital augmentations in a real-world setting. This page is meant to provide an overview of some relevant literature and resources to guide future development of AR collaboration experiences. 

Resources

Using Augmented Reality to Foster Collaboration in the Classroom | by McGraw Hill | Inspired Ideas | Medium.

How AR is being integrated into collaborative learning settings, where students can view and interact with augmented reality models/visualizations for their class content.

Grand Challenges for Augmented Reality Research | by Mark Billinghurst 

There’s a section in this piece about Collaboration, where it’s mentioned that there is little research done on collaborative AR. It prompts the exploration of sharing what participants are seeing, hearing, and feeling during AR experiences. 

AR/MR Remote Collaboration on Physical Tasks: A Review - ScienceDirect 

This paper provides an overview of research done on AR and MR for specifically remote collaboration on physical tasks. There were seven lenses looked at for each paper reviewed, including collection/classification research, 3D scene reconstruction, conducting research, local/remote UIs, common UIs, sharing non-verbal cues, and applications/tools. 

UX Design for Emerging Technologies: AR, VR, and MR | Designlab

This article outlines common uses for AR, VR, and MR. Specifically, the MR section goes through use cases for collaboration such as 3D hologram collaboration and educational collaboration.  

Embodied Axes: Tangible, Actuated Interaction for 3D Augmented Reality Data Spaces | Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

This paper goes through the process of creating a tangible interface for Mixed reality experiences for remote collaboration. The team created an Arduino-based structure with linear actuators to manipulate a 3D model. With two devices, each collaborator could see and feel how the other collaborator is adjusting the model.

AR versus Physical Data Representations: A Comparison of User Engagement and Spatial Exploration Patterns | Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction

A little less related, but this project had a study where they had researchers engage with models in AR and with a physical mode. In this project, they saw that AR felt more accurate and precise to participants, while they had worries about the fragility of the real life model. 

Design considerations for collaborative AR

Based on these resources, here are some relevant factors to consider when designing for collaborative AR:

• Synchronous/asynchronous collaboration: There are challenges with asynchronous augmented reality collaboration, specifically being able to ground content in multiple physical spaces. A benefit of synchronous AR collaboration allows you to ground content in the same position in a room, providing a key point of context for all users involved.

• Accuracy: With AR collaboration, it's important to consider how accurate and precise your experience is to multiple users. AR might have the benefit of feeling generally precise, but with multiple collaborators, it may be important to consider latency and how accurate the shared understanding/viewpoints are. 

• Tangibility: Any AR experience relies heavily on the resolution of content, and specifically in AR collaboration, there’s a need for content to feel real and grounded between collaborators.

Evaluation checklist

Based on the in-class activity run on web-based and AR collaboration, here are some questions to ask about your AR collaborative experience:

• Efficiency: How quickly can users collaborate? What tools do they need to learn?

• Ease: How hard is it to learn the tool and operate it? 

• Immersion: Does it feel like all participants are together?

• Physical demand: How much physical movement are you demanding from your users?

• Spatial understanding: How well do collaborators comprehend space and their visual relationships to others point of views?